Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

eDigital MXP100 with Voice Control

Posted by michael on from the speak-your-mind dept.

An anonymous reader writes: "Here is a lengthy review of eDigital's 1GB flash MP3 portable that is as much a review on Lucent's remarkable speech recognition technology VoiceNav as it is on the player. VoiceNav offers speaker-independent recognition, meaning it doesn't have to learn each individual user's particular speech patterns like IBM's ViaVoice. Just say the name of a music track into the player's microphone and VoiceNav pulls up and plays that song. In ideal conditions the reviewer was able to twice run through a list of 14 song titles without fail. This included titles with "non-real word" band names like Sum41 and U2. Neat technology that could make its way into PDAs soon. The player is a pretty good one too, using IBM's Microdrive for storage."

2 of 150 comments (clear)

  1. Playlist with 14 entries isn't enough by hovik · · Score: 5, Informative
    In ideal conditions the reviewer was able to twice run through a list of 14 song titles without fail.

    This doesn't mean much. To pick the correct one between only 14 possible is quite easy. The reviewer should rather have tried with a playlist with more than 3000 entres. The error rate will grow exponatially with the number of songs, because statisically more song will be phoneticly more equal, the more you add. (bad way to say it, but you prob get the point)
  2. Hype Company by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    edigital has a long history of using hype and grossly misleading tactics to, IMO, defraud investors. So far they've lost tens of millions of dollars, and recently had to resort to taking a loan at a 49% interest rate just to stay in business. Even the CEO has referred to the investors as a "cult".

    As for their history with their products, their much-hyped Treo barely sold any units in stores, and is now being sold by liquidators on ebay. A lot of customers were a bit pissed that their players didn't come with any storage media!

    This wasn't intended as flamebait, but E.digital has a long history of using hype and misleading tactics to pursue little more than an incursion of investment money from gullible public investors. I didn't lose any money to them, but a lot of people did, and will continue to.

    In fact, they recently registered 20 million more shares so they can stay in business a while longer. They really don't deserve this kind of attention from Slashdot.

    For those considering investing in them, I'd say stay away. For those considering a product purchase, I'd recommend the same.